Adam Blatner

The expansion of our horizons has extended beyond mere vastness or sub-microscopic, beyond ultra-fast and astronomically slow, beyond the most powerfully energetic and near-indistinguishably delicate, to categories that become elusive and quite inconceivable. In chaos theory, the dynamics of fractals, the edges of cosmology and quantum theory and other attempts to determine ultimate principles, there remains an escalating level of ambiguity.

Mythically, what if God were trying to say, “Good, keep looking: but it’s time to realize that you must relinquish trying to get final answers! They will forever elude you, elude human minds, elude the minds of the most brilliant extra-terrestrial beings who have evolved for millions of years longer than humanity, elude all mental efforts. The most extravagant claims of the mystics are valid insofar as they tap into my emerging infusion of spirit into the matter-space-time-energy  universe; and they are invalid insofar as they have any illusion that they really “get” it, or really “know” me or my purposes in any final fashion.” In this sense, being apophatic is closer to the appropriate attitude. (Apophatic is a word to describe an attitude to God that affirms that God cannot be known in any metaphor, only to some degree in terms of what God is not—i.e., not a male, not a king, not human-like, not a particular form, etc.)

Becoming aware that you can never know ultimacy need not dissuade you from imagining that you can continue to learn more relative to what you knew before. There is so much room for learning more in every way. But it is time to stop grabbing for ultimacy, because such attempts are misleading and use up valuable energy. It’s really enough to reach for more, to address slightly less grandiose questions—so many avenues have never been explored.

You’ve worked out tools that extend the senses of sight, sound, and muscular strength in many directions, larger and smaller, coarser and finer, but there are some senses about which you hardly recognize as existing, and yet these constitute your next horizon. There are also some objects of this perception that will forever elude you. The next step is to devise somewhat more reliable tools for extending your perceptions to include types that you can barely imagine. (Imagination and intuition are themselves types!)

So what’s up is a shift in world-view from thinking that knowing the ultimate truth will make a difference in the way you plot your course, in what you investigate, in how you construct your faith. This is because the traditional religions offered encompassing belief systems that seem to be better because they are ultimate. They are neither ultimate nor better. Indeed, traditional systems relied on a stifling of doubt as a requirement for faith.

Modern systems built in the valorization of doubt, but also the underlying assumption that there was in fact an ultimate truth that, when finally accessed, will open doors. This is a little true in some cases, but not for ultimates—rather, for just more far-reaching models or theories that then resolve more intermediary questions—sometimes. But as our horizons have widened exponentially in directions of large and small, slow and fast, etc., edges have been approached where conventional theories of science and even philosophy break down.

Leibniz’ theory of calculus differed from Newton’s in that the former allowed for a degree of indeterminacy in gradations that was less obvious in the mainstream (Newtonian) version. Perhaps in this sense Leibniz was prescient—anticipating a more postmodernist world-view?

The point here is that we need to open to a shift in our approach that opens us to a balance of humility and a spirit of commitment to further exploration. Recognizing the possible un-attainability of the ultimate answers is no justification for giving up on the search for more and better answers. They’re two qualitatively different categories.

Finally, let’s put in a plug here for my suggestion that mind is as much a dimension of reality as time, space, matter, and energy. This makes relevance a variable that is relevant: who cares, and why do we care? What would we do differently if we held a different model in our mind? This is meta-physics, looking at the frameworks within which we consider physics. It isn’t needed all that much for the mid-range of how stuff works. Traditional physics and chemistry is relatively useful in these regards. But questioning ultimate assumptions and how they’re imagined to operate in our minds becomes more relevant when we consider the mysteries at the extremes of size, time, power, etc.